


Book of Stairs

by lyricwritesprose



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio), Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Adventure, Adventure plot is basically an excuse to make these two friends, Crossover, Gen, Pencils In the Margins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 22:08:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20235163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyricwritesprose/pseuds/lyricwritesprose
Summary: Charley Pollard is looking for a dangerous book when she enters a bookshop in Soho.  But all is not well, and she soon finds herself trapped inside the book.  Luckily, she's not alone.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Anonymous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymous/gifts).

For Charley, being in disguise was an anxious thrill, a thrum of exhilaration over a background of nervousness. She made herself as casual as possible, blending in with the foot traffic, crossing the street at the light like everyone else and trying not to gawk at all the strangely shaped automobiles.

Right now, she was in disguise as a Londoner from the year two thousand and six who definitely wasn’t using Time Lord technology to track something. She cradled the locator in her hand, trying not to be furtive, hoping nobody would look at it. It looked like an ornate compass. The needle didn’t point north. Unless she had got turned around, it was leading her somewhat southwest at the moment.

She was in Soho at the moment. Charley had only been to Soho once before, with her father, and he had made it clear that this was not a suitable place for a young lady. Now, on her own, she couldn’t see what was so bad about it. Bustling crowds, much like the rest of London. Here and there a coffee shop.

She looked up from the locator and was hit by the shock of familiarity. Her father hadn’t just brought her into Soho. He had brought her onto  _ this very street _ in Soho. He had been working on his collection of medieval bestiaries and had found a possible lead.

If the bookshop really did have a copy, as a family friend had claimed, Charley’s father hadn’t succeeded in buying it. Afterwards, he described the bookseller as  _ the most exasperating individual I ever met. _ Charley, left to her own devices, hadn’t absorbed much of their argument. She was too busy looking at the shelves upon shelves of ancient books, and wondering what adventures they told of.

Everything else on the street was different. Unrecognizable. But the bookshop was the same.

Charley looked at the locator. It was pointing directly to the bookshop.

Well, she had wanted to go in anyway.

It hadn’t changed on the inside either. It still smelled strongly of old paper. Charley half-expected the same shopkeeper to emerge from the back, but the shop was quiet. Silent.

“Hello?” she ventured.

Nothing. The locator pointed to the back of the shop.

Charley made her way cautiously back. She felt that she was intruding. Something about this shop didn’t feel like a shop, but more like a private space. And there was still nobody here.

There was a book lying on the floor, however. Out of place. Everything in the shop was old, but also neat. Whoever the proprietor was after so many years, they wouldn’t leave a book lying. Charley approached slowly.

The book was dark brown, and looked old. Leather binding, tattered around the corners. The pages were white, though, whiter than one would expect given the book’s evident age. Charley knelt down to look at them.

And realized that she had made a mistake only when she pitched forward, off-balance. She’d found the conceptual trap. The conceptual trap had found her.

_ An object of some sort, _ the Doctor had said.  _ Touching it would probably throw you into the conceptual trap, so be careful. I’ll deal with the beings who made it; you track down the trap itself. _

He had been wrong about needing to touch it, apparently. Evidently all one had to do was look at the pages.

Charley rubbed her head, and sat up.

She was on a landing on a flight of rickety-looking wooden stairs. Stairs with no railings. The stairs seemed to ascend, and descend, through open, dark space. She wasn’t sure where the light was coming from, or why only the stairs were lit. But far below her, she could see a landing where three flights of stairs diverged in different directions.

The floor creaked under her when she stood.

The landing seemed the most logical place to go. That way, she’d have more options than “up” or “down.” Charley set out, uncomfortable with how the stairs creaked beneath her. As far as she could tell, beneath her was an endless drop into inky blackness. If a stair broke underneath her—

They didn’t. She made it to the landing, hearing only the creaking of the stairs. Even when she was standing still, there was a sort of background creak, as if the structure was swaying a little bit, or “settling” the way old houses were supposed to.

Charley had a certain amount of experience with old houses that didn’t do what they were supposed to. She felt a prickle of dread at the thought.

She was trapped here. Trapped, and alone, and vulnerable, with darkness all around.

She wasn’t going to think about that, though. She was going to explore. And she was going to encounter danger, no doubt, but she could handle it, because she was Charley Pollard.

Right.

For lack of a better direction, she turned to the right-hand staircase and started to make her way up it.

_ “Helloooooo!” _

It came from behind her, and Charley gasped and spun.

There was a person, an ordinary person making his way down the left-hand staircase. He was going fast, and Charley almost called out for him to stop, he could stumble and fall off the stairs and be lost to the darkness. Instead, she made her way back to the landing, much more carefully than he was, and reached the landing just as he descended the last few stairs, panting slightly.

He was a middle-aged, pleasant-looking man, although his hair was already white. And he reminded Charley of something. He reminded her . . .

The trip to Soho. The book shop. “You’re the bookseller!” Charley exclaimed. Then she corrected herself. “The bookseller’s grandson, of course.” No, that made it sound like she had known his grandfather, and she was too young for that. Time travel. When she met the Doctor, she had thought that virtually everything that came out of his mouth was mad. Now time travel had made her the mad-sounding one.

The man looked at her sharply and then pulled out some glasses so that he could look at her better. “I am  _ a _ bookseller,” he said, somewhat cautiously. “Are you in my shop? In body, I mean.”

Charley tensed slightly. “You know about the conceptual trap, then?”

“Is that what you call it? Yes, I was attempting to read it when I found out, rather to my chagrin, that wearing gloves doesn’t shield me from the effect.”

“I didn’t see your body in the shop,” Charley objected. “You should have been passed out on top of the book, just like I am. Unless—unless the whole purpose of moving us  _ out _ of our bodies, is so that something else can move  _ in— _ ”

She had to tell the Doctor.

She couldn’t tell the Doctor. She was trapped here.

“I have to destroy it somehow,” she said, almost to herself. “Destroy the book, destroy the trap, everyone whose mind is caught should bounce back. How do you destroy a trap  _ from the inside? _ Do you have a match?”

The man put his glasses away and patted at his pockets. “I’m afraid not.”

Charley didn’t, either. Twenty-first century clothing skimped on the pockets, apparently. “I’m Charlotte Pollard,” she said. “You can call me Charley if you like.” Because they were going to have to be friends if they were to try to get out together.

The man offered his hand, and Charley shook it. “Ezra Fell,” he said.

Charley wasn’t sure if she was supposed to use his first name or his last name. She was, after all, in disguise as a twenty-first century girl, and the twenty-first century seemed informal to the point of rudeness. She decided she couldn’t quite bring herself to be overly familiar with a man old enough to be her father. “Shall we explore? Maybe we can find a weakness in the trap.”

“We would have to keep moving anyway,” Mr. Fell said. “If one goes down far enough, there’s a sort of—liquid darkness. I don’t fancy trying to make my way through it, and it seems to be slowly rising. So,  _ up _ is the direction, and that way,” he nodded back the way he came, “seems to be a bit of a dead end, a landing where all the stairs lead down.”

Charley thought about that, and then took a deep breath, and strode towards the downward staircase. “I want to see it.”

“You realize that going closer will make it more difficult to stay ahead of the stuff.”

“Yes,” Charley said, “but I might find a clue. You don’t have to stick with me.” Much as she hated the idea of being alone in this place.

Mr. Fell was close behind her. “I think I will, if it’s all the same. You appear to know about, er, conceptual traps, you said? I’m curious as to how.”

“A man called the Doctor told me about them,” Charley said. “I was tracking this one down so I could get rid of it. Apparently it comes from a different layer of our universe, like a different page in a book. There’s some hostile force behind this, but the Doctor is going to lock that away. All I have to deal with is the book.”

The man was silent for a moment. Then he said, “The Doctor? No other name?”

“No,” Charley admitted. “I understand that it’s a bit odd.”

“Oh, I’ve met someone with the same affectation. I wonder if they’re the same nameless Doctor? This does seem to be the sort of thing he would be embroiled in.”

Charley twisted around. “You know the Doctor? How?”

Mr. Fell was silent for a few more steps. “The first time I met him,” he said, “he had an uncanny resemblance to my—to a—to someone I know. And he was trying to escape from malevolent statues which were shaped like angels, which, frankly, is just  _ cheek. _ The second time I met him, he was a big sandy-haired man with interesting taste in fashion, and he was attempting to buy a first edition Agatha Christie. Insistent sort. A very difficult customer. But the most interesting thing is, the second Doctor didn’t seem to recognize me at all, while the  _ first _ Doctor had some things to say about my sales practices.”

“You must have met him out of order,” Charley said. “I realize this is hard to believe, but—”

“He travels in time.”

“Yes! Yes, exactly. How did you know?”

“Temporal studies are something of a hobby of mine,” Mr. Fell said. “Although I come at it from an entirely different direction; I’m fascinated by prophecy. But if you think about time enough, you notice an anomaly like that.”

Charley thought about it. She knew she couldn’t rely on her memory of the man in the shop. She had been a child back then, after all. But her memory was saying that Mr. Fell looked uncannily similar. And sounded uncannily similar, too. She remembered the other man’s voice, arguing with her father, and it had the same cadences, the same somewhat fussy precision.

And he knew about conceptual traps.

Was it possible that he was a Time Lord?

If he was, he might be very dangerous.

“You said you know a little about conceptual traps,” Charley said, “but you don’t call them conceptual traps. What  _ do _ you call it?”

“A grimoire,” Mr. Fell said.

That wasn’t what Charley had been expecting. “A grimoire? Seriously?”   
  


“If you travel with the Doctor, you already have cause to believe in some very strange forces. I suspect we just refer to them differently. See, there. Some ten steps or so below this landing. That’s the darkness I was telling you about.”

It did look a bit like water, Charley thought. If water gave back absolutely no reflection. Or maybe it was more like mist, if mist had a clear boundary. It was—it was darkness, that was all.

It shouldn’t make her heart beat faster to look at it. Or her palms clammy. But there was something primally unsettling about it, something wrong, something  _ bad,  _ something—

“There’s someone half in it!” Charley realized, and rushed forward.

The man was not much older than Charley, lying on the stairs, with the darkness up to his torso. At first, Charley thought he was passed out. Then she noticed that his eyes were open and glassy. “Come on, get up!” she said to him, and didn’t even get a blink in response. “Come on, come on—” She grabbed him under the armpits, tried to tug, and found herself absolutely defeated by his weight.

“Here, let me,” Mr. Fell said, and maneuvered past her on the narrow stair. He got closer to the edge than Charley had dared to, yet—a man with no fear of heights, she thought. He picked the semiconscious man up, hoisted him across his shoulder with only a grunt of effort, and turned carefully. “Back up, then.”

He was stronger than he looked. Charley nodded and made her way back to the landing.

As soon as they were at the landing, Mr. Fell put the man down, keeping a hand on his shoulder to keep him sitting up. The man’s head lolled forward. Charley knelt beside Mr. Fell. “Are you awake? Can you hear me?”

No response.

“What happened to you?”

No response.

“Did the darkness do this to him?” Charley wondered aloud. “Or—”

Mr. Fell put his other hand on the man’s cheek and lifted his head up. “I  _ need _ you,” he said, “to wake up now.”

The effect was electric. The man startled upright, eyes suddenly wide. “You!” he said. His voice came out as a rasp. “Are you—” His gaze became more focused as he looked from Mr. Fell to Charley. “I thought I saw—who are you?”

“This is Ezra Fell,” Charley said, “and I’m Charlotte Pollard. What happened to you?”

As she said it, she looked sideways at Mr. Fell. That—might have been a Time Lord trick? Of course, a human who knew what he was doing could probably break a mesmeric trance, if that was what the man had been in, but could he do it that quickly and that easily?

“Stairs,” the man said. “Stairs and stairs and stairs and stairs and . . .” His head drooped lower as he spoke.

“Here, now. None of that,” Charley told him, as sternly as she could, and slapped him very lightly on the cheek. “How long have you been here?”

“I don’t—I don’t have a watch. It’s been days. Only it can’t have been days because I’m not hungry only it has been days because there are so many stairs, so many stairs, so many—I can’t even  _ sleep _ properly and I just need to rest, I just need to—”

“The darkness,” Charley said. “We need to know what you felt when the darkness started to creep over you.”

“The darkness?” The man twisted around, looking fearfully over his shoulder—in the opposite direction from the darkness, as it happened. “That’s why you have to keep climbing. It’s bad.”

“Yes, but did you feel anything?”

The man shook his head slowly. “. . . No?”

“How did you come to be lying there?”

“There were so many stairs. Stairs and stairs and stairs and stairs and—”

“Stop it!” Charley ordered. The man blinked, but did as he was told.

“I think,” Mr. Fell said, in a low voice, “it was the stairs  _ themselves _ that did this to him. The stairs, and exhaustion.”

Charley nodded agreement.

“Which means,” Mr. Fell added, “we still don’t know what the darkness itself will do.”

Charley looked back at the darkness. It was almost to the landing. “What’s your name?” she asked the man.

“Danny.”

“Danny, you have to get up. We have to get to higher ground.”

Danny curled in on himself. “I don’t want to. I can’t. I can’t climb anymore. I just want to sleep. All I want to do is sleep, why can’t I sleep? Don’t make me climb. Too many stairs. Stairs and stairs and stairs and . . .”

“If the stairs did this to him,” Mr. Fell said, “we can’t ask him to do it anymore. Daniel, look at me.”

Danny looked at him, bleary and hopeless.

Mr. Fell clicked his fingers. Danny’s expression changed subtly. “Don’t remember the stairs,” Mr. Fell said. “Go back to when you first picked up the book. And wake up.” He touched the center of Danny’s forehead with two fingers.

Danny disappeared. Dissolved into a muddled cloud of color, and then went  _ away _ in a direction Charley wasn’t quite prepared to deal with.

Charley gasped. “You  _ are _ a Time Lord! You sent him back to his body!”

Mr. Fell stood up. “Yes—no. Yes, I sent him back to his body. No, I’m . . . a considerably more conceptual being than a Time Lord.”

“All right, well, send me back! I should be right beside the book, I could destroy it, and release you—”

The darkness washed over the landing.

Both Charley and Mr. Fell made for the upwards staircase. Charley went first, forgetting her earlier caution. Up the stairs, fast, so fast that the creaks blended one into the next, until she reached the next landing up, panting hard.

Mr. Fell was only a few steps behind her.

Charley turned around. “All right, I’m ready. Send me back.”

Mr. Fell didn’t move. “There’s a problem with your plan.”

“What is it?” Was this where he revealed that he wasn’t on her side?

“When you destroy the grimoire, I won’t be transported back to my body. My body is actually here.”

“The conceptual trap isn’t supposed to work like that,” Charley protested.

“To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think the grimoire would work on me at all. If I’d thought there was even a possibility, I would have closed the shop first. The thought of what  _ customers _ might be doing to my books . . .” That seemed to distress him more than being trapped in a dark, creaking prison of stairs did.

“But how can you tell that your body is here? I feel like I’m here.” Charley looked down at her hands, and found them normal.

“I can tell. I’ve been without a body before, after all. It feels much different. Besides, it makes sense. My body isn’t made of atoms and such, so it doesn’t respond the same way as yours. It goes where I go, barring extreme accident.”

Charley was curious what his body  _ was _ made of, if not atoms, but she decided she ought to take his word about how it worked. “So, if I destroyed the book,” she said, “you would be killed along with it . . .”

“I think it’s very unlikely that something like that could destroy me. But I don’t know that it would bring me home, either. I  _ could  _ end up floating lost where all this used to be.”

“In permanent limbo,” Charley whispered.

“No, Limbo is—” Mr. Fell stopped himself. “Metaphorically speaking, yes.”

“Well, then, we’ll have to find a way out! Come on!”

She went up the stairs.


	2. Chapter 2

Many, many stairs later, she wondered if she was feeling the dulling effect that had so afflicted Danny, or if it was just ordinary tiredness. “I think we can take a break,” she said to Mr. Fell, and sat down on the landing.

There was a creak as Mr. Fell lowered himself down beside her.

“We’re not getting anywhere,” Charley observed.

“No,” Mr. Fell agreed. “If it weren’t for the darkness, I would think we were stuck in a loop. Space  _ can _ be folded like that, with sufficient force of imagination.”

“I suppose we could be in a loop,” Charley said, “if the darkness has a bottom . . . the thing that’s bothering me is that we’re  _ meant _ to climb and climb. We’re doing exactly what the hostile forces want us to do. That’s poor strategy.”

“Quite. I do wonder—are you starting to feel the need to sleep?”

“I’m tired,” Charley said, “but I can keep going for a while yet. Or are you asking if I’m getting mesmerized by the stairs?”

“The first. I was wondering if it was even possible to sleep in this place. That might help account for poor Daniel’s sorry state.”

“Even if a person can sleep, they’ll be driven upwards by the darkness,” Charley said. “Are  _ you _ feeling sleepy?”

There was a hesitation, and then Mr. Fell shook his head. “I wouldn’t know what that feels like. I’ve  _ slept _ before, but on a purely voluntary basis. I find I don’t care for it.”

“Oh, but it’s very pleasant,” Charley protested.

“That’s what a—a person I know says. But I’m afraid it simply doesn’t appeal to me.”

Charley nodded.

“You seem,” Mr. Fell said cautiously, “er, remarkably accepting of beings other than human. Traveling with a Time Lord, and such.”

“Oh! Well, the way I see it,” Charley said, “there’s  _ human, _ as in a Tellurian creature descended from the apes, and then there’s  _ human, _ as in a being with both sapient thoughts and feelings. By the second definition, it doesn’t matter that you’re from another planet.”

“I’m not,” Mr. Fell said. He paused for a moment. “You mentioned layers of the universe, before. Like pages in a book. I’m from a different page.”

“Really?” Charley was aware that her face was showing delighted fascination, and tried to rein it in. The man didn’t want to be treated like a circus attraction, after all. “I don’t suppose you’d know anything about the makers of this trap? The Doctor said they were from a different page as well.”

Mr. Fell shook his head. “It’s a very, well, a very  _ thick _ universe, a hefty tome, to pursue the analogy into the ground. All I can say is that if you think of my page as upwards of yours, I’m reasonably certain that this comes from a page that’s downward. But—my point was, it doesn’t upset you, to travel or converse with someone very different than you are? Humans have a history of—well, of not being very calm, when beings of my sort try to communicate with them.”

“I wouldn’t care if you had eyes on all corners,” Charley declared. “You’re a person, and you were kind to poor Danny, sending his mind back out of this place. That’s enough for me.”

She was rewarded with a brilliant smile.

“At any rate,” Charley said, standing up, “the darkness is catching up. I don’t like the idea of more climbing, but—”

She stopped.

“You thought of something,” Mr. Fell said, pushing himself to his feet.

“Yes, but I’m not sure I’m right. We both think that the darkness is  _ bad.” _

“Well, yes.”

“What if that’s only what the trap wants us to think? What if it’s a sort of, a sort of sham, like beating a drum to flush game? We’re doing exactly what the trap wants us to do. What would happen if we did what the trap  _ doesn’t _ want us to do, and go down?” She thought about it. “We wouldn’t be able to see. That’s bad, on a structure like this. We can’t count on walking straight in the darkness. We’d have to crawl, so that we could safely feel ahead of ourselves for the edge. But—”

“I might be able to do something about the matter of seeing,” Mr. Fell said.

“You could?”

“I might. It depends on what the darkness is made of, and I couldn’t keep it up forever. We’d be taking quite a risk.”

“I know,” Charley said. “But I think it’s a risk in the right direction. I think I believe Danny when he said he was climbing for days.”

  
  


The darkness was lapping at the middle of a staircase when they reached it. Charley stopped and took a deep breath. She thought intellectually that she was right, that they shouldn’t let themselves be driven like wild game. Her nerves and her stomach disagreed.

“Perhaps we should . . .” Mr. Fell said, as if echoing her own nervousness.

“No. No, I’m going in.” She inched forward, took another deep breath, and then stuck her foot down into the stuff.

It didn’t go numb. It didn’t go cold, or hot, or anything else. It felt no different than the rest of her body.

“Are you quite sure you’re all right?”

“I feel all right,” Charley said cautiously, and took the next step down. “I think I’m all right. It’s just darkness.” Another step. “When you think about it, the fact that the stairs are lit—without sunlight, or lamplight, or any source I can make out—” She was up to her waist now, and not being able to see her feet should have made her more frightened than the darkness itself. But something about the darkness was still buzzing  _ wrong, bad, unnatural _ at the back of her mind. “The light is just as strange as the darkness,” Charley said. Up to her chest. “There’s no reason, besides common-sense safety, why one should  _ feel _ so much worse than the other.” Up to her shoulders, step by painstaking step. “It’s either superstition, or it’s imposed upon us, and I don’t think either is a reason—” She took a deep breath, and counted to three in her mind, and then ducked her head under. “To fear it,” she said as she submerged.

The blackness was absolute. Utterly so. She didn’t even have any afterimages of the light she’d been in. Just total, all-consuming blackness. “Mr. Fell?”

There was no answer.

“Mr. Fell!” If he had been too frightened to go in—well, she couldn’t blame him, but that would mean she had to navigate the stairs herself, in utter blackness, without even the—

There was a sudden light from behind her. Not dim, like the light that had been illuminating the stairs before. This was a soft, cool white radiance. Charley turned around.

Mr. Fell  _ himself _ was glowing.

“Are you all right?” he asked anxiously.

Charley realized that her mouth had been slightly open, and shut it. She had meant what she said, earlier, about different sorts of people being just as human to her. Some people had two hearts, and some people glowed. No need to make a fuss over it. “I’m all right,” she said. “I just wasn’t certain you were behind me.”

“The moment you went into the darkness, your voice faded out. Whatever it is, it’s meant to be isolating and debilitating.”

“We should hurry,” Charley said, “before your—” She motioned vaguely. “Your light gives out.”

“Quite.”

So they climbed downward.


	3. Chapter 3

It didn’t take long, compared with the monotonous climb upward, for Charley to start seeing differences in the stairs. The first one was a half-broken board.

Charley tried to step on the unbroken half, but it creaked alarmingly and tilted, and she stumbled past it to the step below. “Better step over that one altogether,” she advised Mr. Fell, heart hammering.

He did.

Charley looked at him in worry. Was his glow diminishing? It certainly didn’t cast light very far, a few feet at most, which made the stairs seem to materialize out of darkness and return to them. If it ebbed—if it ebbed they wouldn’t even be able to communicate.

The next bad stair was gone completely, only the beams underneath still intact. Charley had to hop over that one too, and felt her heart leap again as the stair below creaked unusually loudly. She couldn’t hear the ship-like creak of the total structure around her, just the stairs that she was stepping on. The darkness, she had been right to be afraid of the darkness, it was closing in around her and—

No. No. Stop that. She was Charlotte Pollard, adventuress.

And more and more stairs were rotting.

“Miss Pollard,” Mr. Fell said behind her, “turn around.”

Charley did. “What is it?”

He looked more honestly afraid than she had seen him. “You look—wasted,” he said. “I think the further we descend into the dark, the more, the more deteriorated things become. We have to go back up.”

Charley drew in breath, and looked at the backs of her hands. They looked thinner. Perhaps older? Could she starve herself to death, or age herself to death, pursuing her downward course?

No. “I  _ know _ I’m right. The key to this place must be downwards. The whole place is trying to keep us from reaching it.” A few more stairs, careful of the rotting ones.

“You can’t. You’re mortal, you’ll destroy yourself.” His voice sounded fainter, and Charley realized he wasn’t keeping pace with her anymore.

“You don’t have to come,” Charley said grimly. “I’ve asked you to do enough. I can manage, I can get down on my knees and crawl, but I’m  _ inches _ from breaking this place, and—”

And her foot went straight through a stair.

She fell.

Pitched forward, certain that she could catch herself on the stairs below, and then felt them all splinter under her weight. She was in perfect darkness again, and the splinters of the stairs were around her and she was falling head-first into nothingness, and she screamed, but nobody could hear her—

There was a blaze of white light, magnesium-bright, as a hand caught her ankle.

Charley’s breath was knocked out of her by the sudden sharp pull upward, and she managed to look up, still flailing, and—

Mr. Fell wasn’t standing on the stairs anymore. Mr. Fell was—

That was when the darkness went  _ out, _ and she found herself collapsed full length over the book, in the book shop.

  
  


Mr. Fell let go of Charley’s ankle.

She scrambled upwards, closing her eyes so as not to accidentally look at the book again, and turned around. If she had really seen what she thought she had seen—

Mr. Fell looked completely human.

But Charley had definitely seen wings.

She had a very strong notion that she knew exactly what sort of “conceptual being” he was, and why he had described his layer of the universe as being above Earth, and why he was so concerned that people not be frightened of him, and why he glowed—

But he hadn’t said anything.

He hadn’t said anything, because he didn’t want humans to treat him—well, to treat him as what he actually was. To treat him differently. When you thought about it, awe would definitely make a person uncomfortable.

She would pretend she hadn’t seen, Charley decided. She had, after all, been upside down, in a very bad position to get a look at anything. And besides, you didn’t pry into peoples’ private business. Even if you considered them friends. Perhaps especially if you considered them friends.

And Charley did want to be friends.

“Are you all right?” Mr. Fell asked, a little breathlessly.

“I think so. What happened?”

Mr. Fell made for the front door and turned the sign to  _ Closed. _ Charley realized that the blinds were drawn on all the windows, and she was almost certain they hadn’t been when she came into the shop. “At a guess,” Mr. Fell said, “the grimoire never took into account the notion that someone would go off the stairs. The entire idea was that people would stay  _ on _ them, at all costs. When you fell, it must have had approximately the same effect as dividing by zero on a pocket calculator, and the grimoire spit us both out.” He strode back toward the book. “If you would turn around, please? And you might want to cover your eyes.”

Charley turned around quickly. When—someone like Mr. Fell—told you not to look back, it was advisable to listen.

Sure enough, the flash from behind her came with a crack of sound, this time, and it was brilliantly blinding even with Charley’s hands over her eyes. She yelped involuntarily, and then blinked away spots.

“Safe to turn around now?” she said, after a moment.

“I should think so, yes.”

Charley turned around. The book was gone. It had left a cloud of greasy black smoke, but no ash. Mr. Fell turned on a sort of rotating fan and opened the windows.

“Thank you,” Charley said. “For destroying the trap, and for—being with me. I don’t think I could have made it through the darkness without you.”

“If it comes to that,” Mr. Fell said, “I don’t know how long I would have kept climbing before I tried something else. I can be—well, inclined to follow rules. So I think we’re even.” He looked awkward. “Would you care for some tea? You could tell me about your adventures with the Doctor. I don’t, well, I don’t often leave Earth these days, and it would be nice to hear what’s happening in the wider universe . . .”

“I’d love to!” Charley said sincerely.

  
  


“You never said,” Mr. Fell said, handing Charley a cup of tea, “how you knew that I was the proprietor of this shop.”

“Thank you,” Charley said. “Many years ago, my father came looking for a book to add to his library. He collected medieval bestiaries, you see. I was always fascinated by them, but I could so rarely look at them, because they were old and delicate.” She took a sip and smiled. “I liked to spin tales for myself about facing the monsters in the books. I would be a noble lady of France or Germany, and the knights would ride out one by one against the creature, and one by one they would be lost. And at last the only knight left would be the one I loved, so instead of letting him go, I would pin up my hair and put on his armor and ride out on his magnificent white horse—”

“And emerge victorious,” Mr. Fell filled in. He didn’t seem to find the fantasy ridiculous, although he was smiling at it.

“Well, yes. That was the main thing. I think much of the fantasy, the castle and the beloved knight and so forth, were there because all the fairy tales  _ expected _ them to be. What I really wanted was the adventure.”

“You seem to have found it,” Mr. Fell said.

“What about you?” Charley asked daringly. “You run a book shop, when you could be, I don’t know, off across the universe, or—” Probably best not to say  _ flying anywhere you liked. _ She was firmly pretending that she didn’t know what Mr. Fell was, that she simply thought him to be a “conceptual being” from a different part of reality. Which was true enough, she supposed. Just—deliberately incomplete. “Or back home, to the page of the universe that you come from.”

She ached to know what  _ there _ was like. Did it have endless new things to see?

She supposed she could ask him. But she didn’t want to ruin the fragile rapport they had. Mr. Fell liked her, she thought, not because of any great duty of love, but because she was unafraid of people who weren’t ordinary Tellurians. For his sake, she  _ had to _ go on treating him like an ordinary—being.

A friend was more important than an angel anyway.

“Oh, but I like Earth,” Mr. Fell said hastily. “And I like my book shop, better than almost anything. Here I am, surrounded by knowledge, and thoughts, and dreams, and anything that humans thought was important enough to put on paper. Sometimes happy, sometimes sad, always fascinating. I have a universe in here. It may even be as large as the universe you have out there.”

Charley smiled back at him. “I suppose we’re both living our best life, when it comes to that.” Not that she hadn’t been terrified, and full of doubts. But, adventure—she had adventure.

Mr. Fell’s smile flickered. “Mostly,” he said. “There are some things I could wish for—most of them come down to company, really. There aren’t very many people who I can talk to, and the person I can—” He cut himself off. “I don’t suppose you remember the name of the book your father was looking for.”

He didn’t want to talk about it. Well, that was fair enough. “I remember that he told me the English translation of the title was  _ Serpents and Dragons,” _ Charley said. “I couldn’t tell you who wrote it.”

_ “Serpentum, et Draconum. _ The Aldrovandi. Yes, that’s a lovely one for dreaming up adventures. I—don’t suppose you’d like to see it? No tea anywhere near, of course, and you’d have to wear gloves, but—”

Charley sensed she was being offered a rare privilege. “I don’t want to take the chance of damaging something that precious to you,” she began.

“I don’t want to take the chance of it being damaged either,” Mr. Fell admitted, “but I trust you to treat it with respect.”

“Then, yes. I’d love to see it.”  _ Serpentum, et Draconum. _ Words to conjure adventures with. The fair princess disguises herself as a man . . .


End file.
